Pulp's ‘More' Is a Master-Class Comeback Record
It's been almost a quarter century since Pulp's last album. But the Sheffield, England band — who disbanded after releasing 2001's We Love Life, reunited to tour in 2011 and again in 2023 — are back with More. The band's eighth full-length builds on Pulp's legacy of indie-disco bangers like 1995's 'Common People' and mini-epics like the title track to 1998's bummer ride This Is Hardcore. It's technically a reunion album, but it's not asking the question 'do you remember the first time?' as much as it is wondering what happens next, to often-revitalizing effect.
These 11 songs represent an evolution of Pulp in both sound and outlook — something that should be inevitable after two and a half decades, but that is too often lacking from later releases by big-ticket outfits. Leader Jarvis Cocker still embodies a raffish, witty cool that inspires varying degrees of aspirationalism and envy, although now his croon's edges are a bit weathered, his world-weariness a bit softer and more informed by what he's lived through than any hell he might be anticipating. Songs like the triumphant 'Got To Have Love' possess a slow-burning grandeur that is made to send festival crowds into a frenzy—a hallmark of Pulp tunes — even as their arrangements, which are often delightfully heavy on the strings, feel more homespun than the orchestral flourishes of the band's '90s work.
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Cocker was inspired to get the band back in the studio in part by the deaths of his mother and the band's longtime bassist Steve Mackey; More is the first album since Pulp's 1987 release Freaks to not feature his playing. A sense of mortality has always hung over Pulp's work, but moments like the rueful close of the glam spectacle 'Background Noise,' or even Cocker gasping 'hurry, 'cos my sex is running out of time' on the skeletal, absurdist 'My Sex,' bring it to the fore.
More adds additional highlights to Pulp's already robust catalog. 'Grown Ups' opens as a jaunty remembrance of Cockers' days as a young scenester who was just learning the ins and outs of the bus; as time passes, the rhythm keeps up, but the lyrics grow more agitated as Cocker realizes that 'growing up' is full of drudgery and food consumed simply because it's time to do so. 'I'm sorry for asking/ But are we having fun yet?' he exclaims near the song's end, the answer obvious. The luminous, stretched-out love song 'Farmers Market' — where Cocker whispers and eventually wails, 'Ain't it time we started living?' when realizing that he's met a kindred spirit, obliquely asserting that going all in is the best way to defy the reaper's scythe — is a stunner, the delicate arrangement making its golden-hour parking lot setting nearly burst into brilliant view.
For years, Pulp has realized the futility of trying to recapture youth probably better than most rock acts out there — after all, Cocker did sigh 'One day you'll be older too/ You might need someone who can pull you through,' on the Hardcore track 'Help the Aged.' At the time, Cocker was in his mid-thirties, and having a laugh about the whole thing; on More, though, he and his bandmates are delivering on that promise, working out their own creative impulses while giving their generational cohort — and anyone who might follow it — a glimpse of how getting older can be a chance to grab brilliance once again.
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